Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar

Chandrasekhar, Subrahmanyan 

Born Oct. 19, 1910, in Lahore, India (now in Pakistan). American physicist and astrophysicist.

Chandrasekhar graduated from the University of Madras in 1930. He received a Ph.D. degree from Cambridge University in 1933 and taught at Cambridge until 1936. He moved to the USA in 1936, becoming an American citizen in 1953. In 1937 he joined the staff of Yerkes Observatory and the faculty of the University of Chicago; he became a professor at the university in 1942.

Chandrasekhar’s main works deal with stellar structure, stellar atmospheres, and the dynamics of stellar atmospheres, as well as with mathematical physics, in particular, the theory of stochastic processes. Chandrasekhar developed a theory of white dwarfs that predicts the existence of a mass limit for white dwarfs, which is known as Chandrasekhar’s limit, and gives a universal relationship between the mass and the radius of a star; the relationship specifies the final stages of stellar evolution. Chandrasekhar also studied the dynamics of stellar systems and radiative transfer in plane-parallel stellar atmospheres. He examined problems of hydrodynamic and hydromagnetic stability in the framework of the general theory of relativity.

Chandrasekhar became a fellow of the Royal Society of London in 1944 and is a member of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences.

WORKS

In Russian translation:
Stokhasticheskieproblemy v fizike i astronomii. Moscow, 1947.
Printsipy zvezdnoi dinamiki. Moscow, 1948.
Vvedenie v uchenie o stroenii zvezd. Moscow, 1950.
Perenos luchistoi energii. Moscow, 1953.
Ellipsoidal’nye figury ravnovesiia. Moscow, 1973.

O. V. KUZNETSOVA